Letter: Who could be so cruel as to steal from a cemetery?

I just came home from visiting my husband's grave as I do each day since he passed away in June, the day before our anniversary. Today was a hard day for me as I had attended my next-door neighbor's funeral and thought about all the kitchen table conversations we shared over the past 20 years that I will miss.

I just came home from visiting my husband’s grave as I do each day since he passed away in June, the day before our anniversary. Today was a hard day for me as I had attended my next-door neighbor’s funeral and thought about all the kitchen table conversations we shared over the past 20 years that I will miss.

My life has turned upside down with my husband and now my elderly neighbor both gone in a matter of months. I wanted to share the day with Bob as I have done daily since he passed. I drove down the hill at Hillside Cemetery, parked near his grave, and got out my blanket to sit on as I always do (unless it’s raining — then I sit in the car and talk to him). When I turned to place it next to his grave, I got the shock of my life and burst out sobbing. Someone had stolen the planter I had placed at the head of his grave.

It wasn’t a fancy pot, but I had found just the right one — the last one in the store at the end of the season in July — in his favorite color blue. I planted his casket flowers in it: the zinnias and marigolds he loved so much that I had given the florist to add to her cut floral arrangement for his casket. That’s what got to me and why I cried so hard; they were his casket flowers. I knew they wouldn’t last through the winter, but they meant a lot to me to have them growing there next to him. I had just found his headstone this week and that is being engraved, and these flowers were going to be planted in front of it ... but now they will not.

I hope whoever stole the planter can enjoy my husband’s casket flowers, while I sit by his grave every day and look at the depression where it used to be.